Have You Noticed the Tilted Horizon Poster Marketing Trend?

Movie posters trends come and go — but they never really go away completely. More often than not, Hollywood marketers recycle the same compositions and themes, baiting us with their cheap gimmicks to get our attention. There's the giant heads floating in the clouds trend, extreme eyeball close-up trend, that earthy cobalt blue that every nature-based piece of cinema boasts trend, characters running trend, the bold typeface trend, and much more. Vulture's sharing another entertainment fad: the tilted horizon poster.

The website posits that the dizzying, off-kilter imagery popped up with the release of X-Men: First Class last year and has continued with Hugo, The Hobbit, Happy Feet Two, and several other disorientingly advertised films. "The idea behind the tilting trend is that it forces our brains to engage with the poster's image and mentally correct it … " which is exactly what we tend to do when we see a picture frame hanging crookedly, or a pile of magazines messily stacked. It's a kind of trick to force viewers to inadvertently engage with the piece of art, even if they have no interest in seeing a film like American Reunion.

As one former head of a studio marketing department said, "There’s only so much you can do with a poster to make it come alive, and, well, now they’re doing it." We've seen 3-D posters and motion posters used to promote various films, but all the flashy, fancy stuff in the world can't help a poorly executed core design — and many people find the gimmick peskily distracting. Check out a few examples of this tilted design trend below and feel free to point out other movie posters that use a similar slanted approach.

Movies.com, the ultimate source for everything movies, is your destination for new movie trailers, reviews, photos, times, tickets + more! Stay in the know with the latest movie news and cast interviews at Movies.com.